Re: House Rules?

francisca wrote:

Found this in Jason Vey's Acheron supplement. I'm using this as a houserule for any old-school D&D-esque system, including AS&SoH:

The Power of Wine

“Wine!” gasped the king from the couch where they had laid him. Theyput a goblet to his bloody lips and he drank like a man half dead of thirst.“Good!” he grunted, falling back. “Slaying is cursed dry work.”--Robert E. Howard, “The Phoenix on the Sword”

Wine—standard, normal, everyday wine—is also a powerful restorative inthe Conan narratives. It warms the blood and gets warriors and adventurersback on their feet. Whenever a character is wounded, he can drink a flagon ofwine, mead, or grog, and instantly recover 1d6 hit points per level of thecharacter, per flagon or flask drunk. No character can benefit from this morethan once in a 24-hour period, and if a character drinks more than two flagons(four for fighting-men), he may begin to suffer the effects of drunkenness, atthe DM’s discretion.

EDIT: I'd probably cap this at 1d6 of healing.

I really like this. We do a similar thing in our PF campaign. We have no clerical magic so we make good use of healing poultices and herbs. The wine idea is very thematic to Hyperborea, good stuff.

Re: House Rules?

I'll work it out so the players roll all the dice. I've done it in Pathfinder and I'm doing it in Dungeon World and I won't go back to touching dice again. The players rolling everything has several benefits. The top one is it keeps them engaged and tense in the action if they are rolling defense against attacks and rolling their own damage. The second, corollary benefit is it nearly completely absolves their poor beleaguered GM of blame when things go wrong.

Re: House Rules?

Jimm.Iblis wrote:

I'll work it out so the players roll all the dice. I've done it in Pathfinder and I'm doing it in Dungeon World and I won't go back to touching dice again. The players rolling everything has several benefits. The top one is it keeps them engaged and tense in the action if they are rolling defense against attacks and rolling their own damage. The second, corollary benefit is it nearly completely absolves their poor beleaguered GM of blame when things go wrong.

Who rolls the to hit and damage of the monsters? The character being attacked?

“How can I wear the harness of toilAnd sweat at the daily round,While in my soul foreverThe drums of Pictdom sound?”

Re: House Rules?

@Brock - Are they easily compatible with AS&SH? I'll check them out, as I do love some resource management.

My houserule:Luck Points - PC's get 2 Luck Points per session. I mix two different types of tokens in a bag and players each blindly draw 2. The regular tokens allow a reroll of any one dice roll the player makes, or you can spend one to avoid a hit by instead breaking your armor or weapon.The other tokens allow the same effects, but cost some sort of price/inconvenience when used. (Bow string breaks, tavern starts on fire, NPC starts making off with treasure, etc.)

"But not all men seek rest and peace; some are born with the spirit of the storm in their blood" -REHRambling Conan Blog

Re: House Rules?

Re: House Rules?

Jimm.Iblis wrote:

I'll work it out so the players roll all the dice. I've done it in Pathfinder and I'm doing it in Dungeon World and I won't go back to touching dice again. The players rolling everything has several benefits. The top one is it keeps them engaged and tense in the action if they are rolling defense against attacks and rolling their own damage. The second, corollary benefit is it nearly completely absolves their poor beleaguered GM of blame when things go wrong.

How do you handle activities like finding traps and listening at doors (assuming Dungeon World has such things)? If you tell a player "You find/hear nothing" it's obviously going to take on a different meaning if he knows for sure whether he succeeded at the check.

(Not that I'm tempted to implement this scheme in any case - I love rolling dice!)

Re: House Rules?

mabon5127 wrote:

Who rolls the to hit and damage of the monsters? The character being attacked?

Yes, the player being attacked. In Pathfinder, and in a system like AD&D, they roll a defense check, adding their AC bonuses to a d20 vs the 10+the attack bonus of the monster. if hit, they roll the monster's damage. The latter is standard in Dungeon World, the rule being if they can't bear to roll damage against themselves they ask another player to roll for them.

Re: House Rules?

Blackadder23 wrote:

How do you handle activities like finding traps and listening at doors (assuming Dungeon World has such things)? If you tell a player "You find/hear nothing" it's obviously going to take on a different meaning if he knows for sure whether he succeeded at the check.

I've never been a fan of rolling dice for perception checks in 3.x/PF or any other skill roll for the players even when I was rolling dice for monsters. Without knowing the target number, a "nothing" call from me means the same thing. I suppose it's more transparent in AD&D, but in any system, the point is more to get the party to interact with the environment in a meaningful way, rather than play a "gotcha" game. Where are you searching? How do you disarm the trap? How do you open the secret door? How do you prepare for the enemies on the other side of the door?I play with people who are pretty vehement anti-metagamers. Even if they were not, letting the players be masters of their character's fate at all times means more to me than ambushing them with a trap or monster.

Re: House Rules?

Grimmshade wrote:

@Brock - Are they easily compatible with AS&SH? I'll check them out, as I do love some resource management.

Hi Grimmshade. The rules for LotFP without art and magic are free. The encumbrance rules are compatible with any OSR system, AS&SH included. It's a simple system that lends itself well to hacking and tweaking to taste.

Jimm.Iblis wrote:

I've never been a fan of rolling dice for perception checks in 3.x/PF or any other skill roll for the players even when I was rolling dice for monsters... the point is more to get the party to interact with the environment in a meaningful way, rather than play a "gotcha" game. Where are you searching? How do you disarm the trap? How do you open the secret door? How do you prepare for the enemies on the other side of the door?

I agree with you here Jimm and I guess you can say that it a house ruling of mine. Every time the dice clatter it breaks immersion so I try to keep it to a minimum. Basically, my goal is that dice are only rolled when the consequences are interesting and meaningful. The importance of player action over the dice is the core of the Rulings, Not Rules described in A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming.

DM: A grotesque statue dominates the room atop a raised dais. It is carved from an oily black-green stone and depicts a disgusting cone of slime at least nine feet tall. In the torchlight you can make out an inscription on the base, "All hail the Faceless King."New School Player: I rolled a 25 on my Perception, what do I notice?Old School Player: I approach the statue carefully for a closer look and tap it with my ten foot pole.

Re: House Rules?

Jimm.Iblis wrote:

Blackadder23 wrote:

How do you handle activities like finding traps and listening at doors (assuming Dungeon World has such things)? If you tell a player "You find/hear nothing" it's obviously going to take on a different meaning if he knows for sure whether he succeeded at the check.

I've never been a fan of rolling dice for perception checks in 3.x/PF or any other skill roll for the players even when I was rolling dice for monsters. Without knowing the target number, a "nothing" call from me means the same thing. I suppose it's more transparent in AD&D, but in any system, the point is more to get the party to interact with the environment in a meaningful way, rather than play a "gotcha" game. Where are you searching? How do you disarm the trap? How do you open the secret door? How do you prepare for the enemies on the other side of the door?I play with people who are pretty vehement anti-metagamers. Even if they were not, letting the players be masters of their character's fate at all times means more to me than ambushing them with a trap or monster.

Re: House Rules?

@OP: Rust monsters can kill with their feelers, because there's iron in your blood and want you to know they're tired of being everyone's favorite "dumb monster."

@Blackadder: I get to build the world, come up with cool challenges, make players feel awesome...

An analogy is two toddlers playing blocks, sitting across from each other. One is carefully stacking the blocks into a tower. When--or maybe a little before--the tower is complete, the other child gleefully knocks the whole thing down.

Now, a cynical person might say that only the second child, the one knocking down the blocks, is having fun. But a more observant person says, "look at how the first child sorta feigns frustration before both children start laughing together." The first child begins building another tower, doomed as it is, knowing full well if he wanted, he could just play blocks alone.

We DMs build towers and we get to watch our friends knock them down. We get to cheer on their success, and maybe feign a little frustration at how unexpectedly easily they made it look or how hard you worked... just so they feel that much cooler and more clever. That's the role that's fun to me. If it wasn't, I guess I'd go write a book or something.

@Brock: Another good Dungeon World lesson coming out of Pathfinder. In my last session, the PCs actually had to confer and find a solution to a trap guarding a secret door. I don't miss the Disable Device check at all.

Re: House Rules?

Brock Savage wrote:

Every time the dice clatter it breaks immersion so I try to keep it to a minimum. Basically, my goal is that dice are only rolled when the consequences are interesting and meaningful. The importance of player action over the dice is the core of the Rulings, Not Rules described in A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming.

I think it is that same document, maybe that very concept you are talking about, that sort of got me out of my Pathfinder rut and reflecting on my gaming experiences of the last couple of years.Mind you, I'd never run anything as successful for as long as my Pathfinder campaign and had a great consistent group for the 2+ years we did it. But...

When I switched to Dungeon World, one of my group was constantly asking what she rolled for things. That's how Pathfinder had trained her, and us. The fact is, Pathfinder has a system and dice convention for everything and anything. It was nothing but rolls. Social interaction, combat, scholarship, exploration: all rolls. And worse, by level 5, there wasn't anything the party could realistically fail at. They were all optimized for their niche (social, combat, scholar, explorer--all covered), and I helped them do it, because I was an optimizer too.

Now, our sojourn into Dungeon World is a little exercise in weaning us off of the bad 3.x habits of rolling everything, or thinking something has to be on the character sheet or a system has to exist to do things. Dungeon World is a little too inadequate for the kind of rich environment I like to turn my players loose in, so I am relieved for the OSR and all the great interpretations of D&D out there--and the chance to dust off my old modules!

Thought of another houserule that I'll have for AS&SH that segues from my rant here. This stems also from experience showing that skill point systems are redundant because everyone tends to keep their class's "expected" skills maximized. Some of you already probably do this. Just assume that a class knows things related to their class. Rangers know about the wilderness and survival. Priests know about the undead and deities. Wizards have a smattering of smarts and book learnin', and fighters know about smithing and soldiery. So, no roll required, just reveal what they should realistically know. A neat Dungeon World background-phishing trick might be to ask how exactly they learned something if the tidbit is truly esoteric or especially helpful.

Re: House Rules?

Anyone rule against poison insta-death? I know its legacy and classic and old school and all, but... I am thinking if hit points are an abstraction of health and luck why is poison damage different? At least offer some small chance to survive it? I am thinking damage based on what it could normally kill (this might require Wikipedia): Strong enough to kill a normal guy: 3d10 on a failure. Strong enough to kill an elephant: 10d10 on a failure--or some huge number. Maybe the snake's venom didn't discharge. Maybe the poisoned dagger was left out in the dry air too long. Maybe it got tangled up in a blood clot. Maybe you sucked it out in time, or flexed it out because you're so goddam macho...

Re: House Rules?

Most AS&SH monster poison gives a timeline before death when magic or class abilities can be applied. I don't find I need to relax it any more than that. It's fun to watch them regret letting the shaman be the first in the spider caves.

Re: House Rules?

Handy Haversack wrote:

Most AS&SH monster poison gives a timeline before death when magic or class abilities can be applied. I don't find I need to relax it any more than that. It's fun to watch them regret letting the shaman be the first in the spider caves.

In the fourth hour of the con game they are all insta-death.

“How can I wear the harness of toilAnd sweat at the daily round,While in my soul foreverThe drums of Pictdom sound?”

Re: House Rules?

mabon5127 wrote:

Handy Haversack wrote:

Most AS&SH monster poison gives a timeline before death when magic or class abilities can be applied. I don't find I need to relax it any more than that. It's fun to watch them regret letting the shaman be the first in the spider caves.